Workouts For Women Over 40

If you’re looking for workouts for women over 40, then it’s time to learn a few of the key concepts that you should know to make sure your chosen workout has all aspects of fitness covered.

Many women over forty who are looking for a good workout program tend to miss out on some of the elements that will bring them quicker success, thus they fail to make the progress they had hoped they would and quickly become frustrated.

Fortunately though, the search for exercise for women over 40 doesn’t have to be a struggle when you know precisely what you’re looking for.

Let’s have a quick look at what you should be looking for when choosing a properly designed workout program.

Three Resistance Training Days

The very first thing that you’ll want your workout program to have is a good resistance training component. Many women over 40 are very quick to gravitate to the cardio machines only, often because they are firstly scared of adding too much muscle bulk and second because they feel that it’s just too late to start weight training.

This isn’t the case. It’s never too late to start weight training and the fact of the matter is that it’s even better at this age than it ever was before. Now you’re at the primary time when you could start to see bone loss taking place due to lack of weight bearing activity, so weight training will completely help to reverse this.

In addition to that, you know that slow metabolism that so many women over 40 complain about? Weight training will take care of that as well. The metabolic slow-down that often accompanies later age is mostly due to the loss of lean muscle mass that takes place.

Since weight training will promote lean muscle mass building, it will help overtake this loss so that you maintain a higher metabolic rate and fight future fat gain.

Since you will have a slightly lower overall recovery ability however, limit your weight training workouts to just three days per week. This will still be a high enough frequency to see excellent progress, but not so high that you’re feeling drained at all times.

Progressive Cardio Training

The next thing that you want to have in your workouts is a progressively intensive cardio training regime. While if you’re first getting started you definitely won’t want to jump into interval sprints, that should be your end goal.

There’s no reason why you can’t see significant improvements to your cardiovascular fitness levels and interval sprints are the perfect way to accomplish this.

Being that you are slightly older however, aim to take your intervals to the 60 second mark, pairing them with an active rest period of 60 seconds as well.

This will allow you to go at a slightly reduced pace (but still quite intense) compared to if you were doing 30 second intervals. The intensity has an indirect relationship to the length of the interval, so 60 seconds will be perfect for your cardio sessions.

Some Form Of Relaxation Training

The fourth element that should be in place with your training session is some form of relaxation based training.

Chances are you’re at the point in your life where you may experience more and more stress on a daily basis due to a demanding career that you’ve worked hard for many years to achieve, which means finding a way to take care of this stress is imperative.

Relaxation based exercises such as yoga, tai chi, or meditation will be perfect for this and will really help to round out your workout routine.

In addition to this, these forms of training tend to further improve your overall recovery ability between those intense workout sessions as well, so that’s yet another reason to add them to your program once or twice a week.

Even if you just prefer to devote 20 minutes to lying quietly and practicing some deep breathing – just make sure you get it in there. Do what works best for you and what you feel helps you handle your stress.

Female Specific Exercises

Finally, the last thing that you’ll want to have in place when designing a workout routine is specific exercise for women over 40.

Most women of this age group tend to experience the greatest problems with their lower abs, under arms, as well as upper thighs, so you’ll want to be sure that you have some exercises in the workout program that will tone these specific areas.

The top choices that you should consider including will be tricep kickbacks, overhead tricep extensions, push-ups, shoulder presses, lunges, step-ups, let presses, squats, lying leg raises, reverse crunches, and the plank exercise.

Each of these exercises is really going to zero in and target those specific areas of the body while helping to build up some firm muscle tissue.

Remember though that much of improving the look of these areas will come down to reducing your body fat level and the best way to go about doing that will be through using a properly planned diet.

When you’re eating right to not only fuel your workouts but also burn fat faster, that’s when you’ll really see the most remarkable changes in the body while doing these specific exercises.

So there you have the top tips to remember for choosing workouts for women over 40.

If you are serious about reaching your fitness goals and improving the way your body looks, make sure that you do spend some time thinking about the workout design you’re going to use as it will play a key role in allowing you to maximize progress.

For more quick tips and complete workout programs to get started with, please check out the Fit Over 40 program.